Feeding time at the fort brought forth especially negative commentary from contemporary visitors. James Clyman, a Virginia-born mountain man who had no reason to sympathize with the Indians since they nearly took his life twice during attacks in the Rocky Mountains, nonetheless recalled in 1846 that Sutter fed his Indians like animals. "The Capt. [Sutter] keeps 600 to 800 Indians in a complete state of Slavery and as I had the mortification of seeing them dine I may give a short description. 10 or 15 Troughs 3 or 4 feet long were brought out of the cook room and seated in the Broiling sun. All the Labourers grate [sic] and small ran to the troughs like so many pigs and fed themselves with their hands as long as the troughs contained even a moisture." Dr. G.M. Waseurtz af Sandels, a Swedish naturalist and artist visiting Sutter in 1842, left a description of mealtime that supported Clyman’s later observations: "I could not reconcile my feelings to see these fellows being driven, as it were, around some narrow troughs of hollow tree trunks, out of which, crouched on their haunches, they fed more like beasts than human beings, using their hands in hurried manner to convey to their mouths the thin porage [sic] which was served to them. Soon they filed off to the fields after having, I fancy, half satisfied their physical wants."

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Sutter also sold Indians into slavery. The reputable Indian historian Jack Forbes asserts that Sutter’s forces captured Indians from remote villages and then sold them to rancheros in coastal California. This slave trade also included the kidnapping and selling of Indian children. In 1876, at his home in Lititz, Pa., Sutter dictated his reminiscences to the famous California historian and bibliophile Hubert H. Bancroft. Based on the information provided, Bancroft reported that "from the first, [Sutter] was in the habit of seizing Indian children, who were retained as servants, or slaves, at his own establishment, or sent to his friends in different parts of the country[Alta California]. But he always took care to capture for his purpose only children from distant or hostile tribes…"

Sutter did not attempt to rationalize the Indian slave trade in his reminiscences other than to state that "it was common in those days to seize Indian women and children and sell them. This the Californians (Mexican Californios) did as well as Indians." Although the enslavement and sale of Indian women and children was a relatively universal practice in Mexican and early American California, Sutter arguably was one of its earliest and most active white participants.

In the Spring of 1846, Sutter gave about a dozen Indian slaves to fellow California businessman William A. Leidersdorff to help pay off a debt. Leidersdorff, although Sutter and most others had no idea, was a black man (of Danish-African ancestry) who apparently saw nothing wrong with having native American slaves ( see "Westerners" in the February 2001 issue of Wild West).

Whatever the frequency of Sutter’s kidnappings and sale of California Indians, inhumane business was sufficiently extensive and troublesome to force Governor Alvarado to intervene. He explained: "The public can see how inhuman were the operations of Sutter who had no scruples about depriving Indian mothers of their children. Sutter has sent these little Indian children as gifts to people who live far from the place of their birth, without demanding of them any promises that in their homes the Indians should be treated with kindness. Sutter’s conduct was so deplorable that if I had not succeeded in persuading Sutter to stop the kidnapping operations it is probable that there would have been a general uprising of Indians within the Northern district under Sutter’s jurisdiction as a Mexican official."

With the beginning of the California Gold Rush in 1849, self-proclaimed "Captain Sutter of the Royal Swiss Guard of France" fell victim, like the Indians whose labor and lives he had taken, to a new, gold-crazed, socially unstable and economically rapacious California. Within two decades of the gold rush, the Indian population had been reduced dramatically by disease, homicide and the disruption of traditional food sources.

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